Round a great fire which burned on a large round flagstone, and glowed on the red-hot legs of a trivet, unoccupied for the moment, some worm-eaten tables were ranged haphazard, without the smallest regard to symmetry or order. On these tables stood a few overflowing tankards of wine or beer, and grouped round them many bacchanalian faces reddened both by the fire and wine. Here was a man, round of belly and jovial of face, noisily embracing a thick-set, brawny trollop of the streets. Here a sham soldier, whistling cheerfully while he unwound the bandages of his false wound, and unstiffened his sound and vigorous knee, strapped up since the morning in yards of ligature. Anon it was a malingreux—a malingerer—preparing with celandine and oxblood his “jambe de Dieu” or sore leg for the morrow. Two tables farther on a coquillart with his complete pilgrim’s suit, cockle-shell on hat, was spelling out and practising the Plaint of Sainte-Reine in its proper sing-song tone and nasal whine. Elsewhere a young hubin was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old sabouleux, who was teaching him how to foam at the mouth by chewing a piece of soap. Close by, a dropsical man was removing his swelling, while four or five hags at the same table were quarrelling over a child they had stolen that evening. All of which circumstances two centuries later “appeared so diverting to the Court,” says Sauval, “that they furnished pastime to the King, and the opening scene of the royal ballet, entitled ’Night,’ which was divided into four parts and was danced on the stage of the Petit-Bourbon.” “And never,” adds an eye-witness in 1653, “were the sudden metamorphoses of the Cour des Miracles more happily represented. Benserade prepared us for it with some very pleasing verses.”
Loud guffaws of laughter resounded everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one said his say, passed his criticisms, and swore freely without listening to his neighbours’. Wine cups clinked and quarrels arose as the cups met, the smash of broken crockery leading further to the tearing of rags.
A great dog sat on his tail and stared into the fire. A few children mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and wailed; another, a bouncing boy of four, was seated with dangling legs on too high a bench, the table reaching just to his chin, and said not a word; a third was engaged in spreading over the table with his fingers the tallow from a guttering candle. ly, a very little one was squatting in the mud, and almost lost in a great iron pot, which he scraped out with a tile, drawing sounds from it which would have made Stradivarius swoon.
There was a barrel near the fire, and seated on the barrel a beggar. It was the King upon his throne.
The three who had hold of Gringoire led him up to the barrel, and the pandemonium was silent for a moment, save for the caldron tenanted by the child.
Gringoire dared not breathe or lift his eyes.
“Hombre, quita tu sombrero, ”5said one of the three rogues in possession of him; and before he could understand what this meant, another had snatched off his hat—a poor thing, it is true, but available still on a day of sunshine or of rain.
Gringoire heaved a sigh.
Meanwhile the King, from his elevated seat, demanded: “What sort of a rascal is this?”
Gringoire started. This voice, though speaking in menacing tones, reminded him of the one which that very morning had struck the first blow at his Mystery, as it whined in the middle of the audience, “Charity, I pray!” He looked up —it was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, invested with the regal insignia, had not one rag the more or the less upon him. The sore on his arm had disappeared certainly, while in his hand he held one of those leather-thonged whips called boullayes, and used in those days by the sergeants of the guard to keep back the crowd. On his head he had a sort of bonnet twisted into a circle and closed at the top; but whether it was a child’s cap or a king’s crown it would be hard to say, so much did the two resemble one another.
However, Gringoire, without any apparent reason, felt his hopes revive a little on recognising in the King of the Court of Miracles his accursed beggar of the great Hall.
“Ma?tre,” he stammered, “Monseigneur—Sire—How must I call you?” he said at last, having reached the highest point of his scale, and not knowing how to mount higher nor how to descend.
“Monseigneur, Your Majesty, or Comrade—call me what thou wilt, only make haste. What hast thou to say in thy defence?”
“In my defence?” thought Gringoire; “I don’t quite like the sound of that. I am the one,” he stammered, “who this morning—”
“By the claws of the devil,” broke in Clopin, “thy name, rascal, and nothing more! Hark ye! thou standest before three puissant sovereigns—myself, Clopin Trouillefou, King of Tunis, successor to the Grand Co?sre, Supreme Ruler of the Kingdom of Argot; Mathis Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia, the yellow-vised old fellow over there with a clout round his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who’s hugging a wench instead of attending to us. We are thy judges. Thou hast entered into the Kingdom of Argot without being an Argotier, and so violated the privileges of our city. Thou must pay the penalty unless thou art either a capon, a franc mitou, or a rifodè—that is to say, in the argot of honest men, either a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Art thou any one of these? Come, justify thyself—describe thy qualifications.”
“Alas!” said Gringoire, “I have not that honour. I am the author—”
“That’s enough,” resumed Trouillefou without letting him finish; “thou shalt go hang. A very simple matter, messieurs the honest burghers. We do unto you as we are done by. The same law that you mete out to the Truands, the Truands mete out to you again. You are to blame if that law is a bad one. No harm if now and then an honest man grin through the hempen collar—that makes the thing honourable. Come, my friend, divide thy rags cheerfully among these ladies. I am going to string thee up for the diversion of the Vagabonds, and thou shalt give them thy purse for a pour-boire. If thou hast any last mummeries to go through, thou wilt find down in that wooden mortar a very passable stone God the Father that we stole from Saint-Pierre-aux-B?ufs. Thou hast four minutes to throw thy soul at his head.”
This was a formidable harangue.
“Well said, by my soul!” cried the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his wine pot to prop up his table. “Clopin Trouillefou preaches like a Holy Pope!”
“Messeigneurs the Emperors and the Kings,” said Gringoire coolly (for somehow or other his courage had returned to him and he spoke resolutely), “you fail to understand. My name is Pierre Gringoire. I am a poet, the author of a Morality which was performed this morning in the great Hall of the Palais.”
“Ah! ’tis thou, Ma?tre, is it?” answered Clopin. “I was there myself, par la tête de Dieu! Well, comrade, is it any reason because thou weariedst us to death this morning that thou shouldst not be hanged to-night?”
“I shall not get out of this so easily,” thought Gringoire. However, he had a try for it. “I see no reason why the poets should not come under the head of vagabonds,” he said. “As to thieves, Mercurius was one—”
Here Clopin interrupted him: “Thou wastest time with thy patter. Pardieu, man, be hanged quietly and without more ado!”
“Pardon me, Monsieur the King of Tunis,” returned Gringoire, disputing the ground inch by inch; “it is well worth your trouble—one moment—hear me—you will not condemn me without a hearing—”
In truth, his luckless voice was drowned by the hubbub around him. The child was scraping his kettle with greater vigour than ever, and, as a climax, an old woman had just placed on the hot trivet a pan of fat, which made as much noise, spitting and fizzling over the fire, as a yelling troop of children running after a mask at Carnival time.
Meanwhile, Clopin Trouillefou, after conferring a moment with his brothers of Egypt and of Galilee, the latter of whom was quite drunk, cried sharply, “Silence!” As neither the frying-pan nor the kettle paid any attention, but continued their duet, he jumped down from his barrel, gave one kick to the kettle, which sent it rolling ten paces from the child, and another to the frying-pan, upsetting all the fat into the fire; then he solemnly remounted his throne, heedless of the smothered cries of the child or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was vanishing in beautiful white flames.
At a sign from Trouillefou, the duke, the emperor, the archisupp?ts, and the cagoux came and ranged themselves round him in a horse-shoe, of which Gringoire, upon whom they still kept a tight hold, occupied the centre. It was a semicircle of rags and tatters, of pitchforks and hatchets, of reeling legs and great bare arms, of sordid, haggard, and sottish faces. In the midst of this Round Table of the riffraff, Clopin Trouillefou, as Doge of this Senate, as head of this Peerage, as Pope of this Conclave, dominated the heterogeneous mass; in the first place by the whole height of his barrel, and then by virtue of a lofty, fierce, and formidable air which made his eye flash and rectified in his savage countenance the bestial type of the vagabond race. He was like a wild boar among swine.
“Look you,” said he to Gringoire, stroking his unsightly chin with his horny hand. “I see no reason why you should not be hanged. To be sure, the prospect does not seem to please you; but that is simply because you townsfolk are not used to it—you make such a tremendous business of it. After all, we mean you no harm. But here’s one way of getting out of it for the moment. Will you be one of us?”
One may imagine the effect of this suggestion on Gringoire, who saw life slipping from his grasp, and had already begun to loosen his hold on it. He clutched it again with all his might.
“That will I most readily,” he replied.
“You consent,” resumed Clopin, “to enrol yourself among the members of the ’petite flambe’ (the little dagger)?”
“Of the Little Dagger—certainly,” answered Gringoire.
“You acknowledge yourself a member of the Free Company?” went on the King of Tunis.
“Of the Free Company.”
“A subject of the Kingdom of Argot?”
“Of the Kingdom of Argot.”
“A Vagabond?”
“A Vagabond.”
“With heart and soul?”
“Heart and soul.”
“I would have you observe,” added the King, “that you will be none the less hanged for all that.”
“Diable!” exclaimed the poet.
“Only,” continued Clopin imperturbably, “it will take place somewhat later, with more ceremony, and at the expense of the city of Paris, on a fine stone gibbet, and by honest men. That’s some consolation.”
“I am glad you think so,” responded Gringoire.
“Then, there are other advantages. As a member of the Free Company you will have to contribute neither towards the paving, the lighting, nor the poor—taxes to which the burghers of Paris are subject.”
“So be it,” said the poet. “I agree. I am a Vagabond, an Argotier, a Little Dagger—whatever you please. And, indeed, I was all that already, Monsieur the King of Tunis, for I am a philosopher and ’Omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho continentur’—as you are aware.”
The King of Tunis knit his brows. “What do you take me for, my friend? What Jew of Hungary’s patter are you treating us to now? I know no Hebrew. It’s not to say that because a man’s a robber he must be a Jew. Nay, indeed, I do not even thieve now—I am above that—I kill. Cutthroat, yes; cutpurse, no!”
Gringoire endeavoured to squeeze some extenuating plea between these brief ejaculations jerked at him by the offended monarch. “I ask your pardon, monsieur, but it is not Hebrew; it is Latin.”
“I tell thee,” retorted the enraged Clopin, “that I’m not a Jew, and I’ll have thee hanged, ventre de synagogue! as well as that little usurer of Judea standing beside thee, and whom I hope to see some day nailed to a counter, like the bad penny that he is.”
As he spoke, he pointed to the little bearded Hungarian Jew who had accosted Gringoire with “Facitote caritatem,” and who, understanding no other language, was much astonished that the King of Tunis should thus vent his wrath on him.
At length Monseigneur Clopin’s wrath abated.
“So, rascal,” said he to our poet, “you are willing to become a Vagabond?”
“Willingly,” replied the poet.
“Willing is not all,” said Clopin gruffly. “Good-will never put an extra onion into the soup, and is of no value but for getting you into Paradise. Now, Paradise and Argot are two very different places. To be received into Argot you must first prove that you are good for something, and to that end you must search the manikin.”
“I will search,” said Gringoire, “anything you please.”
At a sign from Clopin, several Argotiers detached themselves from the group and returned a moment afterward, bearing two posts ending in two broad wooden feet, which insured them standing firmly on the ground. To the upper end of these posts they attached a cross-beam, the whole constituting a very pretty portable gallows, which Gringoire had the satisfaction of seeing erected before him in the twinkling of an eye. It was quite complete, even to the rope swinging gracefully from the transverse beam.
“What are they after now?” Gringoire asked himself with some uneasiness. The jingling of little bells, which at that moment sounded on his ear, banished his anxiety, for it proceeded from a stuffed figure which the Vagabonds were hanging by the neck to the rope, a sort of scarecrow, dressed in red and covered with little tinkling bells sufficient to equip thirty Castilian mules. The jingling of these thousand bells continued for some time under the vibration of the rope, then died slowly away and sank into complete silence as the figure hung motionless.
Then Clopin, pointing to a rickety old stool placed beneath the figure, said to Gringoire, “Mount that.”
“Death of the devil!” objected Gringoire, “I shall break my neck. Your stool halts like a distich of Martial: one leg is hexameter and one pentameter.”
“Get up,” repeated Clopin.
Gringoire mounted upon the stool and succeeded, though not without some oscillations of head and arms, in finding his centre of gravity.
“Now,” continued the King of Tunis, “twist your right foot round your left leg, and stand on tip-toe on your left foot.”
“Monseigneur,” remonstrated Gringoire, “you are determined, then, that I should break some of my limbs?”
Clopin shook his head. “Hark ye, friend—you talk too much. In two words, this is what you are to do: stand on tip-toe, as I told you; you will then be able to reach the manikin’s pocket; you will put your hand into it and pull out a purse that is there. If you do all this without a sound from one of the bells, well and good; you shall be a Vagabond. We shall then have nothing further to do but belabour you well for a week.”
“Ventre Dieu! I will be careful,” said Gringoire. “And what if I make the bells ring?”
